The Ultimate Precondition (Laughing at It) / Diedrich Diederichsen ’s contribution to the arts of the than advancing like a slowly widening river, twentieth and twenty-first centuries does they cut through the density of the decades, not consist of many elaborate, room-filling, ages, and periods like bundles of rays and time-consuming works that require a great generate epiphanies. They draw themselves in deal of reception time, storage space, or even and are thin, like projectiles; they are very close prior knowledge. And yet they are so funda- to being completely immaterial, and yet they mental that they generate more thought time are massively preoccupied with bodies, their than the work of artists who are demanding weight, and the conditions in which they live. in the former sense. Although they relate to Perhaps in part because they are so swift and artistic formats, genres, and tools—music, film, lean, Branden W. Joseph has organized his nar- painting, installation, musical instruments, rative of Conrad’s work3 around the Deleuzian projectors, light, amplification, etc.—his works notion of the “minor” artist. Conrad did not were rarely curated, administered, interpreted, produce his pieces from a position of power or stored by established institutions in almost and authority, from the pedestal of the work. any period of his life. But his anarchism was not, as is so often the By thought time I do not mean merely the case with anarchists, another word for a lack of length of time some pieces take: consider, for concentration; it found its artistic equivalent in example, the Yellow Movies, 1972–73 (figs. a fundamental questioning, a critique of art in 56–59). For each of these works, Conrad out- the most fundamental sense of the term. lined a movie screen with black brushstrokes Artistic practice is work that reconstructs on a large sheet of paper and then filled it human activity starting from its basic precon- in with cheap paint, the gradual yellowing ditions. One could, for example, with Kant, of which he regarded as a film—a very long view these basic conditions—the a prioris—as one, of course. What is telling here is that the space and time; with Lessing, the imperatives point is not to watch the yellowing process but addressed to the artists in this direction have rather to think it—but to do so on the basis of already been developed. It is no coincidence the fact that it is actually happening. Nor do I that in the decades preceding Conrad’s early simply have in mind the very long drones that activities in the United States, a “Newer he played in the early 1960s with the Theatre Laocoön” was envisioned,4 whose author, of Eternal Music, which he preferred to call Clement Greenberg, attempted to reformulate —hardly anyone actually for modernism the old order that Lessing had heard them. We know more or less how they established in the eighteenth century by dif- may have sounded, but above all we think ferentiating between the spatial and temporal them; we think their length.1 But thought time arts.5 This reformulation ultimately gave rise refers not just to the time in which we think to the quintessential and now all-too-familiar but also to the thinking of time. Nor would that modernist demand for medium specificity, mean simply, in the case of Conrad, the notion which in essence was already expressed by of an endless aesthetic experience—endless Lessing, and which calls for artworks to do because it is always there to be sampled afresh everything they can transparently do with and and reflected on—but also the concrete idea say about their medium—but to avoid perform- of the surpassing of all lived experience by ing magic or creating illusions. permanent (technical) recordings. In a video Yet in the blind spot of this modernism, two that Conrad wished to have released only after new, fundamental, and closely related condi- his death, he talks about the idea of speaking tions of the arts have emerged. For these to be from beyond the grave with an audience of the elevated to the status of a prioris as well, the as yet unborn.2 concept would have to be expanded some- But we do not think about the durations and what. If the a priori is classically a precondition surpassings of the experienceable the same for thinking and imagining anything at all that way we do exciting, mysterious, and inscru- is capable of giving rise to a valid judgment, we table formulas and symbols. We think them, can also speak, with Michel Foucault, of a “his- effectively, with our senses; they exercise an torical a priori” that describes the “condition[s] imagination harnessed to the senses. Yet they of reality” of statements.6 With this concept, the also brush up against what Kant called the political and social preconditions are so closely mathematical sublime, that is, the surpassing linked to the technical and medial ones that of the imagination within precise mathematical technological developments do not just consti- categories—but more on that later. tute conditions secondarily, when implemented No, these ideas have not gathered dust in as part of the production process. In my view, museum storerooms, nor have they motivated however—and this is especially true of the the many dissertations that will take up space arts—this idea implies a second important pre- and gather dust in turn. They are nimble ideas condition, at least for all the arts that work with and at the same time much too basic to spread recording technologies, and only then becomes Fig. 19. Conrad in a classroom, date unknown. 38 39 out and take up large amounts of space. Rather fully operative. For in these arts, the reference to reality is no longer primarily diegetic and projects themselves, which do not adhere to aggressive, very physical, and very male artist period in particular, to which I referred at the symbolic (temporal: a succession of conven- any style or genre or even to what the dis- versus patient material. Conrad also conducted beginning of this essay. The notion that when tional signs) or mimetic and iconic (a resem- course of the art world today would call a posi- aggressive assaults like these on the physical light falls on celluloid or photographic paper, blance deployed in space or on a surface) but tion—from the mathematician and philosopher film, except that in his case they were much when stampers are cut, and when grooves punctual and indexical. The twentieth century Henry Flynt to the founder of queer cinema and more complex.8 The point of applying this rep- are pressed into lumps of vinyl, it constitutes is distinguished by direct transmission from theater, Jack Smith, from Mike Kelley to Tony ertoire of attitudes and gestures to film, which a brute, undirected influencing of matter by reality, recorded and initially uninterpreted Oursler, , , La Monte wasn’t normally exposed to such hands-on, other matter, and that the appearance of legible impressions caused by living persons. These Young, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, and Uwe direct interventions (which were not unlike the semantics and its units, such as meaning, con- sensations caused by photographs, films, and Nettelbeck/Faust. And there are many others later scratching of records in hip-hop) was to tent, images, or chords, is just a special case sound recordings are no longer subject in the as well. Conrad often talked about how in early align the new medium with the old, so that the of that phenomenon, represents an important same degree to artistic influence and deter- 1960s Manhattan, just a few blocks apart, one critical, anti-illusionist gesture did not need to starting point for Conrad. For him, the vast, mination by a purposeful artistic project that could find the completely independent and change much. entropic waters of dull materiality in which the approaches and approximates the external sur- original planets, even universes, of Jack Smith However, Conrad soon began to take a fun- fragile dinghy of sense cognition is bobbing face of the world as mimesis. Since the advent and , and how despite a few damentally different approach. For example, by are a meaning, an object of fascination—but of photography and phonography, there has personal encounters and discussions they were cooking and seasoning film and finally by pick- one that can no longer be painted or evoked in always been a snapshot at the heart of every able to evolve independently of each other in ling it like cucumbers or gherkins, he not only literary language like the experience of natural project; the punctum governs a central part all of their radicalism. parodied the simple, para-iconoclastic gesture beauty or the sublime in classical art, with its of every act of reception, and with it, magic: But Conrad went a step further than his of many experimental filmmakers, which in human-piloted, pre-mechanical, and pre-techni- the radical and instantaneous conjuring up of many collaborators. He did not remain wedded any event did not bear frequent repeating. He cal procedures of writing and painting. an absent person, often one who has already to just one of these radical worlds but spent also exposed it to a different practice that was In The Flicker, 1966, or in the drones that died, within a present order—usually that of the time in all of them, bringing each of them to a frugal and domestic rather than artistic and Conrad repeatedly performed and rethought, image, music, or the narrative arts. head to confront its conditions of possibility, expressive. Curried 7302 and 7302 Creole, both the point is to expose the human body to this Thus, illusion has become real; magic its a priori, its point. These are very different 1973 (figs. 70 and 71), could still be watched a-communicative but massive world of effects

works. And the problems to which modernism things, but for him they coincided: what is the as movies. Soon, however, with Pickled 3M that lies outside meaning-based communi- THE ULTIMATE PRECONDITION (LAUGHING AT IT) reacted with its imperative of medium speci- ultimate precondition, and how can we manage 150, 1974 (fig. 79), he separated the film effect cation and to demonstrate its power beyond ficity have increased tremendously—as have to leave it behind or arrive at its limit while from the reflection on the medium: the think- conventional aesthetic reception.9 The drones certain opportunities. If we were now to call on laughing about it? Since the advent of techni- ing of the medium becomes poetic and above also turn on the fact that the sounds we hear an artist working with recording media to do cal image and sound recording, we have been all dependent on a power of imagination that and produce when we produce long-duration so in a medium-specific way, he or she would dealing with the index-based exhibition value combines strong sense data with an open, sound material can no longer be distinguished. actually have to step up rather than forgo the of the voyeuristic observation and hearing of comical, and clearly impossible movement of We are no longer dealing with a chain of creation of illusion. And even if we take the unintentional acts. In one of his very earli- thought. The medium that is meant to be the effects in which a sound leaves the body that Greenbergian imperative of medium specificity est works, Conrad abstracts from the purely object of reflection doesn’t actually fulfill its produces it and encounters another sensitive,

DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN less literally and translate the critical, enlight- moral condemnation of this phenomenon and medial function in this experiment. The reflec- sensorimotor body in which it provokes an ening intention from which it springs into an reduces it to a performative formula. In his This tion on mediality does not take place medially aesthetic effect. Honed by indexicality, the imperative for artists who work with record- Piece Is Its Name, 1961 (fig. 2), it is possible but in another materiality, with an effect that sense for direct medial causation now has to ing technologies—something that has often to put on any performance at all, provided ranges from comical to archaic. And yet the reckon with the fact that its own body is being been done—the usual result of this notion of the performer doesn’t know that he or she is medium is busy reacting and being influenced supplied with effects by its own body, and that medium specificity is something like the trans- performing it until it is over. This is not just the and behaves in a manner that parallels its erst- sound is no longer being sent into the world fer of Brecht’s alienation effect to the cinema. invention of reality TV; it is a notion of enlight- while function of recording, reproduction, and by intention. Feedback as a subversion of the That gives us a Godard film in which the actor enment with catharsis: finding out that, and inscription. It is subjected to material influences cybernetic, military, medial world order that looks directly into the camera and talks about what, we have just performed. that do not, however, directly write but exert an became visible in around 1960 precisely to production conditions and public film funding Of course, one might have derived some- effect and leave traces behind in a manner that critical, anarchist mathematicians like Conrad in the EU. But this is actually a stepping-up thing else from the imperative of a critical, is more vague and more diffuse. The writing and his friend Flynt would go on to have a or intensification of the magic. The alienation reflexive medium specificity than, for example, (“scription”) in inscription thus appears as a rich career ahead of it in the coming decade— effect destroys the theatrical illusion in which the placement of an instance of the alienation special case of the general case of the material culminating in Jimi Hendrix’s identification an actor merges with his or her role; but the effect in a Godard film (and to be fair, I don’t effect of objects on other objects. In this way, of feedback with America’s self-destruction cinematic (and photographic and phono- mean to reduce Godard’s films to this practice). Conrad imagines and actually creates a larger, through its imperialist wars. graphic) “illusion” that a real human being has One might have exhibited the physical film uncontrollable environment for the familiar With The Flicker, like Guy Debord did in left a (photochemical) trace and is now present itself, the materiality of the medium, and taken process of intentional communicative action, a very different way with his Hurlements en in all his or her reality does not attach much it as the subject of artistic interventions—some- one that is material and medial but not amena- faveur de Sade (Howls for Sade), 1952, Conrad importance to that distinction; what it sets store thing many filmmakers of the experimental ble to readings and intentions, a world of seizes on the basic physical fact that light can by is authenticity. school have actually done. Most of the film crude and aimless or at least uncommunicative reach maximum levels of brightness and dark- A German art historian, looking back at artists who hit upon this idea tended to execute effects of which artistic and aesthetic action ness in the movie theater, and that the succes- what took place in the visual arts particularly it with an expressive and aggressive gesture: constitutes a subset. Instead of treating art as sion of different degrees of brightness is what in the United States and in the international scratching or overexposing the film, or—like the qualification and specification of a general constitutes the dispositif of cinema. culture of Fluxus and Happenings, used the Andy Warhol—using the standardized lengths communication- and medium-related activity, This is the physically relevant exterior of term Realkunst, or “reality art,” to describe of the rolls, or—like Jack Smith—editing the he represents the larger, less specific material meaning-making through pictorial plots and the it.7 Conrad’s great gambit in the various arts film in real time during the screening. In all of environment of communication. magic or seduction of the indexically transmit- and anti-arts in which he was involved was to these interventions, the relationship between The idea that artistic action is, as described, ted physicality of cinema. While the American accept the challenge of “reality art.” In doing artist and material is reconstructed in almost a very special case of material influence is conceptualism that emerged shortly afterward so, he had various colleagues who were almost the same way as it was introduced by Abstract already a response to the new situation of sought to discern a propositional core in the unimaginably diverse—as diverse as Conrad’s Expressionist painting: a quick and agile, 40 41 media in the twentieth century and the postwar artwork and to present it as the latter’s most of God and gods, it was always music that was Dream Syndicate I: (1965), Table of the supposed to exhibit or apply the astonishing Elements W 74, 2000, CD) and some unofficial releases; and comparable later recordings by John Cale, La Monte analogies that existed between the distances, Young, and . Above all, however, I like to dimensions, motions, or orbits of planets, fixed imagine the endless afternoons in 1965, which ended— stars, and other cosmic objects on the one perhaps—with Cale and Conrad leaving La Monte hand and the tones and scales in their musical Young’s Church Street loft and getting together with Lou order on the other. Many authors, philoso- Reed and Walter De Maria at Pickwick Studios to record early punk rock as The Primitives. phers, and musicians of the past two centuries 2. Richard Wicka, “Tony Conrad unedited,” released April have found cosmic consolation in an otherwise 9, 2016, five-part video interview, running times variable, chaotic world—a world that tends toward https://youtu.be/qL2MWNX2TQ0, https://youtu.be/ entropy—in this search for a harmonic order, Fos4XLZs0Cs, https://youtu.be/Qb39YbccEtg, https://youtu. including Hans Henny Jahnn, Hans Kayser, be/FzzWSKunsmg, and https://youtu.be/B2mixNqwd5U. and Alexander Scriabin, as well as more 3. Branden W. Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (Brooklyn: Zone modern variants of this basic idea in Karlheinz Books, 2008). Stockhausen and La Monte Young but also Sun 4. Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoön,” Ra and John Coltrane. The idea of a just into- Partisan Review 7 (July–August 1940): 296–310. nation, which aimed at a certain real, physical 5. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on sonic order in contrast to a Western convention the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University of equal intervals developed for rationalistic Press, 1984). and instrumental reasons, also belongs more 6. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge broadly to this line of thought, and Conrad was (1969), trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, heavily involved in that undertaking while a 2010), 126–31. member of the /Dream 7. Klaus Hoffmann, Kunst im Kopf: Aspekte der Realkunst (Cologne: Du Mont, 1972). Here, too, we already find the Syndicate. The mathematics of sonic relation- THE ULTIMATE PRECONDITION (LAUGHING AT IT) connection between an art that only exists in the imag- Fig. 20. Conrad playing music in his New York loft, ca. mid-1960s. ships remained a lifelong interest of his. ination, without any medial inscription, yet at the same Photo: Frederick Eberstadt. But Conrad was above all an anarchist, time makes use of art’s great outside, the real. an enemy of power, of institutions and struc- 8. This is evident in 4-X Attack and a few other works in tures—not in a romantic sense, but because 1973 and 1974. See figs. 72–74, 77, and 78. 9. “My idea was that basically this would just knock he believed in something completely different. people’s socks off, and I wanted them to understand that essential aspect—against the media fetishism large periods of time or across vast distances. Rather, his anarchism was tied to curiosity they were being run by the power of this film. That it was that it saw embodied in Greenberg’s standard Until then, reflection on indexicality, the and to what Asger Jorn once described as the not coming from them.” Conrad to Joseph in Beyond the of medium specificity—Conrad’s attention was involuntary, and the snapshot had influenced source of aesthetic behavior: a curiosity that is Dream Syndicate, 299. 10. I am referring here to the group of artists, including

DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN focused on the medial and material exterior of other—but also typical—twentieth-century determined to get to the bottom of things and Joseph Kosuth, who gathered around Seth Siegelaub in every medially communicated meaning, the artistic practices, from pleasure in the comi- that begins by taking toys apart and generally the late 1960s and early 1970s. Conrad was actually quite 11 noise that surrounds the proposition, without cal effects of gravity in slapstick and hidden destroying whatever is given. In the liner involved with an earlier notion of concept art formulated which the latter is inconceivable. The physical camera footage to the pornographic enthusi- notes accompanying his album Slapping by Flynt in 1963. production of the photographed image and asm for recording physical effects. But in those Pythagoras, 1995, Conrad delivers a primordi- 11. Asger Jorn, Concerning Form: An Outline for a the conditions necessary for its appearance on extended time periods and in the effects that ally democratic and anarchist but also aes- Methodology of the Arts, trans. Peter Shield (Silkeborg, Denmark: Museum Jorn, 2012). paper in the darkroom are prerequisites of any defy the human attention span, it becomes thetic rebuff to the derivation of human order 12. Conrad, “Slapping Pythagoras.” Liner notes for 12 critique; they also take place before any gram- possible to surpass what Kant had in mind from cosmic order. According to him, beauty Slapping Pythagoras, V 23, 1995, CD. mar, cinematic language, or linguistics. Before with the mathematical sublime. Where Kant is consists neither in the great ordered system of there was conceptualism,10 Conrad had already concerned with the fact that we can conceive equivalence and all the power-hungry aesthet- enlightened it regarding its blind spot. and intellectually imagine more than we can ics that derive from it, nor in the severing of Much can be explained biographically, by sensuously perceive and imagine in images— equivalences in an elitist art separated from the the fact that the young Tony Conrad identified for example, infinite numbers—Conrad is world. In the effort to establish a dynamic and with mathematics, linguistics, and other sys- interested, for example with the Yellow Movies, tension-filled relationship between the prod- tematic disciplines in contrast to his father, who in executing real mathematically sublime proj- ucts of artistic thinking and the brute reality of saw himself as an artist. Both Conrad and Flynt ects. We cannot imagine the gradual yellowing the physical (and a politics that has allied itself came out of mathematics. Here, in the realm of of a span of paper covered with cheap paint. It with it), one cannot get by without humor: the the natural and information sciences, there is is one of those natural processes that we know cosmic slapstick of musical kitchen utensils, initially more at stake than in aesthetics; but this about but can never actually witness in our life- for example. What a big, infectious laugh Tony is itself an aesthetic phenomenon, as Conrad times and given the structure of our attention, Conrad had! later recognized. This is where the concept of just as we cannot see an infinite number—but the mathematical sublime comes into play. we can employ it in calculations. Translated from the German by James Gussen With the introduction of material, medial Those who come to art, philosophy, and causation by index-based arts and recording particularly music from mathematics and who methods in the middle of the twentieth century, reflect on the non-human causal relationships the focus of reflection on art turned to the real that characterize the material world and the Notes effect of matter on other matter that occurs cosmos can invoke their ancient Babylonian, 1. I think them based on the knowledge of a few later outside the special case of communication, Egyptian, Greek, and Indian precursors, who reconstructions by Conrad (Early Minimalism: Volume cognizability, meaning, intention, and deliber- discovered non-human but well-ordered One, Table of the Elements As 33, 1997, four CD box set); ate causation—the genesis of traces over very structures there. With or without the presence 42 43 the single tape that was ultimately salvaged (Inside the